How to Thrive with B2B Digital Marketing Campaigns

Today, let’s talk about more than B2B internet marketing success. Let’s instead talk about how business marketers – and their companies – can thrive with the use of internet marketing.

This may seem like a bold statement, but the internet is the most dynamic and most powerful business sales and marketing tool around. It works for businesses in highly competitive markets and those in small niches. Applied with a customer focus informed by analytics, internet marketing creates a constant flow of high quality leads, provides deep insight into customer buying habits and it can even create a “Kum-bay- “harmony between sales and marketing departments.

Yes, that’s right, we said it…when B2B internet marketing flourishes, it does more than create leads and revenue. It creates peace between sales and marketing department. Here’s quick and simple ways to set your marketing up to thrive online.

What Does Your B2B Internet Marketing Funnel Look Like?

A traditional sales or marketing funnel starts at the top. A prospect enters and begins their descent toward conversion. Of course, despite every sales and marketing professionals best efforts, the funnel is porous. As prospects head toward conversion, some leave with many never to return. The bottom of the funnel, the conversions, is always a much smaller number than those who entered.

Internet marketing changes all of this as it accommodates all buying behaviors. Sure the funnel is still porous and prospects escape, but…the flow goes both ways. Prospects who leave can re-enter at the point they left or even closer to the conversion point.

Some prospects may never even enter at the top. They may jump in at the bottom and BOOM – a conversion. To capitalize on this shift in behavior, make sure your funnel has multiple on-ramps at all stages.

And that’s the first way to set your marketing to thrive. Break down the funnel into three sections – top, middle and bottom. Identify the on-ramps at all levels and make them easy to use to accommodate the B2B sales cycle.<<>> For example, paid search and SEO may be at the top, social ads in the middle, and content like a whitepaper may be at the bottom.

This approach applies regardless of whether the funnel creates leads or sales.

Strategies To Connect With Different Types of Buyers

Buyer’s find and interact with a business in different ways. Here’s one example:

That’s five steps to create a highly qualified lead. Now, it would be nice if every buyer’s journey through a funnel was the same, but that’s rarely the case. The rise of mobile search hasn’t made it any easier.

Today, an internet search is only an impulse and arms-reach away. While this *might* not affect lower funnel content interaction, it does affect your top and middle funnel. Every strategy needs to account for these shifts in search and brand interaction.

The way to do this is to understand your different types of buyers and where they appear in the sales cycle. Some buyers may interact on Twitter where others can be found on LinkedIn. Some may prefer content like whitepapers and case studies, while others would rather attend a webinar. Even results from paid search which relies on keywords may vary from region to region as a result of different keyword use.

Buyer types may even vary from your SMB and enterprise customers. The answer to this and the way to get the most from your different buyer types requires three steps. First, identify your different buyer types. Then identify how they engage. Finally, build multiple campaigns that include outreach, preferred content types, and personalized calls to action.

Of course, with multiple campaigns and touch-points, it’s essential to track what works and monitor shifts in customer behavior.

Attribution or Give Every Team Member Their Deserved Credit

Closers get all the credit, right? For years that went for marketing too where “last click” models were used to track the successful elements of marketing. So the landing page that converted got all the credit, a small nod went to the PPC ad that dropped the prospect there and the page one search engine ranking that kicked off the whole thing was ignored.

New attribution models make it possible to track a users movement from first contact to conversion. In instances where marketing generates leads and passes them to sales, CRM integrations are possible to track beyond the leadgen cycle to gain complete visibility from first contact to the sale’s close.

This is where marketing and sales become great teammates. Data gives marketing a better understanding of prospect interests and allows them to make material and interactions to create high quality leads. Sales gets high quality leads (which makes them happy) and CRM data helps marketing to better understand the customer (which makes their job easier, and them happier).